Being a believer in equal opportunity where guns are concerned, I would hope that all the minorities listed in the OP would arm themselves and shoot yahoos who tried to victimize them:
What would I do about a collapse of democracy? At my age and health, try to shelter in place. Stored food, water, emergency lighting and ammunition. My logo: https://i.ibb.co/LghT5Fr/Harmless2.jpg
If you split, what do you do about states like PA, which has been aptly described as Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, with Alabama in the middle? Illinois gives the same problem. Then there Idaho, the Dakotas and Utah. I just don’t cannot see it.
My children and grandchildren are all Canadian citizens, although the in-laws are not. But I guess they could all bolt here. But is it far enough away?
I was about to start a thread on this. Probably still should.
But since Akaj has raised the question, let me ask – other than “because it’s always been done that way” why does a country need to have its land area be connected?
Of course, there are many instances where one land area of a country is separated from the rest by water, like Hawaii. You can go by ship or airplane from the rest of the US to Hawaii, but you can’t drive or walk there.
But then, there’s also Alaska. I’m pretty sure (geography is not my strong point) that you can drive from Washington State to Alaska, but not without going into Canada first.
So, if the new province of Chicagoland and the new province of Detroitopea and etc. want to be part of the same country as, say, much of California, why shouldn’t they? How is that different from Alaska being part of the USA?
I don’t understand why so many people believe that when democracy ends in the US it will only be black people who are affected and that all the white people will go live in a 1950’s suburban fantasy.
Everyone is going to suffer, in terms of worker’s rights, clean air and water, corrupt police forces, a corrupt judicial system etc. Will it be safe to keep your money in the bank if the FDIC is destroyed? Who’s going to stop Trump from destroying it? Trump got a pretty good start on destroying the post office and plenty of white people were hit hard when their medications no longer arrived on time or when their small business couldn’t send out products in a timely manner…we could probably list a million ways that a non-democratic US would hurt white Americans too.
When there isn’t a way to get a fair recourse via the legal system and when voting is a farce, you end up living in a society like Russia…which doesn’t seem too great for the white people living there, so I don’t see why living without democracy would be great for the white people living here.
Republicans aren’t hell bent on destroying democracy for the sake of white people, they want to destroy it for the sake of rich people. And anyone who isn’t mega rich is going to find out how tough living without democracy actually is…including white people.
Being in my 60s, I won’t be throwing Molotov cocktails at the Reich Wing HQ. I’ll keep myself under the radar and weep for the future that my grandchildren to suffer through.
Democracy can only survive if enough people want it to. Right now too many rightwingers think they have a God-given right to control everything and that every election that they don’t win is illegitimate. We have people in information bubbles who can seek out the alternate realities that fit their preconceived ideas and they reject that there is such a thing as objective facts. They long for the days when minorities knew their places, where some people were beaten to death for their sexual preferences, when women were second class citizens. They lost their shit when Obama won the presidency, when gay marriage was legalized, and when women started seriously running for president. In their eyes, if democracy means racial, sexual, and gender equality, they’ll have none of it. They’ll happily have a dictatorship as long as that dictator is one of them.
Since the age of Gingrich, Republicans have lost any interest in governing. Their sole goal is to get and keep power so that the rich get their tax cuts and the underclass is bound by but not protected by the law. We saw this when Democrats gave several concessions to Republicans on the ACA, and got not a single vote from Republicans. We saw this when Pelosi gave the Republicans every concession they asked for on the 1/6 commission, only to have the rug pulled out from Donnie’s hand puppets, McConnell and McCarthy. Name any legislation that any Republican ran on. Odds are you can’t. Instead, McConnell said his goal in 2009 was to make Obama a one term president and his goal in 2021 is to block the Biden agenda.
The issue can’t be solved by splitting the country, each state has blue urban areas and red rural areas. This is a cage match where only one side is going to be left standing. This is where bothsidesism utterly fails, Democrats in the vast majority of cases see themselves as being sent to Washington to do good things for the US, while Republicans see themselves as there to make noise and throw hissy fits.
I disagree, the only way it can be resolved is through dissolution. Yes, there are pockets of red in blue states, but by dissolving the Union we can reduce the ratio to manageable levels. It’s not ideal. The ideal outcome would be for the red states to reject fascism, but let’s not forget that they are refusing to investigate their attempted coup.
Just like the first attack on the World Trade Center was a prelude for 9/11, January 6 is the prelude for their next attack and the fascists are coming perilously close to winning. Dissolution establishes a democracy for at least some Americans.
I’m 73 and retired, and if I only had myself to consider I’d probably take Grrr’s approach: for one thing, odds are very long that I’ll have rung down the curtain and joined the Choir Invisible* before things get seriously oppressive; for another, the Soviet of Washington (at least the Wetside) will likely be among the last to fall.
But I have two daughters, neither of whom is likely to thrive in the kind of society envisioned by the MAGAsses. The younger in particular has chronic health issues which could have her hauled before a(n) Death Economic Utility Panel and consigned to the “Nonproductive” category. Fortunately, I have a bolthole, at least for myself: because my grandfather emigrated from Ireland, I’m registered as a foreign-born Irish citizen. But that option is not available to them, and I’m not sure how much my status would benefit them. Let’s just say I’m researching the topic.
* You’ll be able to tell because the Music of the Spheres will go suddenly and seriously flat.
I agree with pretty much everything you wrote. Indeed, a lot of the late 19th and early 20th century violence, including racial violence, was to some degree the result of wealthy industrial capitalists trying to disrupt organized labor, particularly attempts by blacks to join forces with working class whites.
I find myself in an awkward position on the question: I’m a bit too old to fight, far too young to give up, in a state that was traditionally a battleground, but been drifting further left over the years. The problem is in Colorado, the midline (Denver, major cities [excluding Colo Springs?]) are liberal, but the east and west sides might as well be Kansas. I strongly suspect we’d have a medium warm Civil war in the state between the rural and urban population, who tend to loathe each other.
Colorado Spring would probably half tear itself apart, and that’s leaving out a BIG question no one in the thread brought up, that being the military. In the situation described, where the Republican’s have taken control with a sufficiently large fig leaf to let people just shrug and move on, they are going to be putting boots to the ground to make sure everyone behaves like His Orangeness or heir declare. And we have plenty of recent evidence that the military as a whole is drifting that way anyway - despite the best efforts of several to remain apolitical.
So, we’ll probably end up with various large scale protests and even political violence, which will be harshly suppressed, and then end up as another Turkey where we keep ‘electing’ a dictator and granting ever increasing powers to them.
At which point I’ll have two options, one, emigrate to Israel (have a lot of family there, and we’ll presume the Right of Return is granted), but they have their own ample problems which makes that a possible frying pan/fire scenario. Or, take advantage of my somewhat elderly parents and suggest we all relocate to their properties in Mexico, which are on a 99ish year lease. With their assets, we’d probably be able to live out our remaining lifespan before the out and out chaos and runaway climate issues make the world unlivable.
It’s not far enough away. I’m Canadian and had a 30 yr career in our military. By various accidents of history we have a very, very small population with a disproportionate share of resources. Additionally, we have been a (informal) protectorate of either the UK and the US.
Because of our proximity to a friendly super-power all Canadian governments post WW II have been able to “take it easy” vis a vis defence, all the while seeing ourselves as some inoffensive force for moral good (I think that we had a rude awakening in Helmand Province).
I just hope that our normally Pollyannaish government has some sort of contingency for a collapse of the US as we know it. And this also includes incursions in the north by China or others.
Our military will never be able to win such a conflict without allies but at least we could ratchet up the cost to opponents.
I believe that we are at a crucial tipping point in history and I sincerely hope that the US can keep it together in a sane, logical, science-based fashion.
I would be spending many hours making sure that the technology I used to evade censorship was properly secured.
The presidential republic is an unstable form of government. Loss of democratic freedoms is a risk, but, from a Trumpist POV, there is also high risk of their regime being short-lived.
Very well said, although I lean more towards madmonk28’s view that a negotiated dissolution of the country would be a better outcome for all parties involved.
Yes, but in this hypothetical dictatorship, I think one of their first acts will be to establish a “Great Firewall of America” analogous to the one in China, where sites like the SDMB are blacklisted. Or even worse - the government forces every ISP to maintain a whitelist of approved websites, so that you can’t get around these restrictions with a VPN.
I said “Go live in Chile and not give a fuck.” If I’m going to live somewhere outside the US, it might as well be new and interesting, and have good wine.
